Healing trauma begins with presence—the ability to fully experience what is happening within us, without avoidance or suppression. When we cultivate presence, we create the space to process our emotions, rather than storing them away as unresolved pain.
The Role of Presence in Healing
Presence requires the ability to sit with discomfort and pain. While it is natural to want to escape distress, true healing happens when we allow ourselves to experience our emotions without judgment or avoidance.
By staying present with stress, pain, or discomfort, we give ourselves permission to process emotions as they arise. This means we don’t have to suppress, avoid, or exile difficult experiences. Instead, we meet them with awareness and curiosity, allowing them to be fully felt, understood, and nurtured.
The Consequences of Avoidance
When emotions go unprocessed, they don’t disappear—they accumulate. Over time, this buildup can make even minor experiences feel overwhelming, reinforcing patterns of avoidance and distress. The more we resist feeling our emotions, the more they control us from beneath the surface.
Trauma is not just about what happens to us, but about what remains unprocessed within us. If we continuously push painful experiences away, they can become stored in our bodies and minds as unresolved tension, fear, or numbness. This accumulation can make us more reactive and less flexible in handling future challenges.
Cultivating Resilience Through Presence
On the other hand, when we practice presence with ourselves and our experiences, we cultivate resilience, agency, choice, and autonomy. Presence allows us to accept, understand, express, comfort, and nurture what we are experiencing. It helps us meet life with openness rather than resistance.
Being present with an experience means seeing and feeling it through its range of emotions, lessons, and perspectives. While a moment may initially feel painful or stressful, it can also carry the potential for growth, joy, and connection. If we only focus on the discomfort, we risk missing the deeper transformation that lies beneath it.
By being present with our experience, we can observe how our perception shapes and amplifies emotions like fear or anxiety. Presence allows us to recognize when past experiences are influencing our current reactions—when we are projecting old pain onto new situations. By staying with these emotions instead of resisting them, we gain the ability to soften our response, easing tension rather than reinforcing it.
As Takuan Soho once wrote, “Because our paths are predetermined, we are completely free.” When we accept the present moment as it is, we free ourselves from the weight of past conditioning and open the door to new ways of experiencing life.
Transforming Our Relationship with Stress
By embracing discomfort and training ourselves to become more flexible with stress, we build our capacity to engage with life’s challenges rather than retreat from them. Life will always include pain, stress, and uncertainty. But when we stop seeing these experiences as threats and instead as opportunities for growth, we reclaim our ability to shape our own journey.
Presence is not about eliminating hardship—it is about transforming our relationship to it. When we allow ourselves to fully engage with all of life’s experiences, we find that healing is not about escaping pain, but about moving through it with awareness, strength, and self-compassion.